kimihiro
by the hikikomori life
Summary: "He can't help spacing out sometimes, as though he's trying to hear an echo of a voice that disappeared long ago." Doumeki in a world without Watanuki.


**Kimihiro.**

It begins when he is six years old. He starts awake in the dead of night, distraught, only to discover that his face is wet with tears.

"What's the matter, Shizuka? Did you have a bad dream?" says his grandfather comfortingly, stroking his hair with a warm hand.

The six-year-old Doumeki Shizuka opens his mouth, then closes it, and scrubs his face dry with his sleeve. It's too late - the dream has faded, leaving nothing but the vague impression of loss. He is irrationally angry with his grandfather for waking him, and with himself, for forgetting. The only thing he can be certain of is that it was no nightmare; it was something terribly important, something fleeting and faded which he came so very close to grasping, but just fell short. He can't frame his troubled emotions with words, and instead rolls over on his futon, letting his grandfather rub his back in soothing circles, until sleep overtakes him once more.

In high school, he meets Kunogi for the first time. When he notices her across the crowded hallway on the first day of school, that ribbon in her hair, her uniformly so neatly pressed, deja vu hits him so hard it's like a physical blow. But no, he's never met her before, he can't have, and he has no idea why he would feel that way. It's almost like finding something that he's been looking for all his life. (Almost.) At first he mistakes this strange feeling for love, but he's quickly disillusioned. His heart doesn't beat faster when he's with her, her smile, cute as it is, doesn't make him swoon. Something is always missing. They even try holding hands, once, another failed experiment which he quickly pulls away from. She probably thinks he's just being shy, but really, it just feels wrong, and afterwards he regrets it terribly.

And yet, somehow, without knowing how or when it happens, he always finds himself with Kunogi. Almost as if he feels compelled to be with her, even though he doesn't particularly like Kunogi, and he always goes home hungry.

"Do you believe in fate? In soul mates?" she asks him, one day. Her eyes are bright. She smiles at him over her bentou box, her beloved horoscope book lying in her lap.

"No," he tells her, flatly. It is Tuesday afternoon, and they are eating lunch behind the main school building, in the shade of a tree that seems to have been planted there for that very purpose; that seems to have been waiting, always, for them to come and sit beneath it. He wonders what that's like - to wait, patiently, earnestly - maybe forever - for the reason behind your own existence to be revealed to you. (He wonders, if he had to, whether he could do the same.)

There are times when he wakes long before his alarm goes off, when the world is cold and blue in the hours before dawn. He opens his eyes to a room still drenched in darkness, a stranger's name on his lips. Another dream - or perhaps it's the same one. He won't go back to sleep, so instead he dresses, and makes his way outside, briefcase in hand, to where the temple gates lie just ajar. It's not as if Kunogi comes this way in the mornings, and he has no other friends. But maybe this time - somehow - just this once... he keeps his gaze trained on the bend at the top of the street, empty as it is. This is ridiculous, he tells himself. I'm being ridiculous. And still he waits, staying there until he's late for school and shows up at homeroom ten minutes after the bell has gone.

"Where were you?" Kunogi whispers, as he slides into his seat. He doesn't answer her, because truthfully, he doesn't know. He can't help spacing out sometimes, as though he's trying to hear an echo of a voice that disappeared long ago. Like now -

"Doumeki-kun?"

"Hmm?"

"Doumeki-kun? Is something wrong?"

He is frozen in the middle of the street. Kunogi is a few steps ahead of him, looking back, concern written all over her face. He's staring at that piece of land again, that empty plot between two towering apartment buildings which is just a tangled mass of weeds and long grass, discarded aluminum cans and flyaway newspapers, always has been, and yet -

"Nothing," he says. She is trying, always trying her best, to see what he sees. It goes without saying that she never will. At length he starts walking again, briskly, and she has to run to catch up. This is intolerable, she's intolerable, everything's intolerable. The only thing worse than being with her is not being with her, because then he really would be alone - just him and the mysterious imprint of that dream on his heart - and that would be worst of all.

One time he even spends half the night pacing around the park in the pouring rain, looking for something, something to hold in his cold, wet hands to make them stop shaking. Blood-red hydrangeas, he thinks; but it's anyone's guess as to why. He finds none, and comes down with a cold the next morning. Kunogi brings over her mother's home-cooked soup, which he refuses to drink on principle.

Then they are walking home together, another one of those habits that makes the back of his neck prickle like he's being watched. He thinks maybe in another life he would have loved her, if he didn't always feel like there was something he was missing. If he didn't dream of the same faceless stranger every night.

"Don't you have archery club today?" she asks, curiously. There is a precise distance between them, almost two shoulder-widths but not quite. They have never talked about this. He just does what feels right, what comes naturally. Whatever keeps the dreams at bay, when he is lying alone in his room listening to the dull hum of the ceiling fan.

"I quit."

"What? But Doumeki-kun, you've always liked archery -"

"I don't know why," he interrupts, so he doesn't have to listen to her. Truth be told, he's not sure if he ever liked it to begin with. It's all mixed up with the way it makes him feel, the way it fills that strange void in his heart, so even if he hated it, he'd still have done it. It's the same way he's always felt about Kunogi. He's pretty sure he doesn't love her, but being with her is, for whatever reason, better than not.

He graduates from high school as a matter of course, and goes to university two towns away, studying nothing that particularly interests him. Kunogi still stops by at his place from time to time, maybe out of force of habit more than anything else, but he doesn't mind. Sometimes he even makes dinner for her, as though that could somehow make up for years of indifference.

"It's delicious," she tells him, eyes shining, like they did when she was seventeen. "When did you learn to cook?"

_I didn't_, Doumeki doesn't say. He sleepwalks through shopping, his feet carrying him through the aisles. He's not certain that he should have muscle memory of something he's never done before, and it scares him a little. He wonders if maybe he's cursed, or haunted, if he wronged someone in a past life, and that's what has made him this way. But he doesn't believe in reincarnation, only death. And he stopped believing in spirits when his grandfather passed away; he wouldn't start now, unless he saw them with his own two eyes.

He dreams: of a letter with script that trembles across the page like the wings of a butterfly, barely stilled. Of a spider's web whose fragile threads catch flame, and burn away. Of patterns and lines drawn in shifting sand and the fortune-teller's craft. Of lifting a lantern against the dark, with someone by his side. Then he dreams of reaching out and taking that hand in his, as though it were the easiest thing in the world. He dreams - and one day he wakes, and realizes that he has become an old man.

The very last time, he is lying in bed, trying not to feel the aches and pains the passing seasons have put in his bones. At first he doesn't understand what is happening, but it hits him when he tries to open his eyes, to lift his hand, and finds he has not the strength to even do that. He is alone, and he is dying. This is the end, and there will be nothing more.

_I wish I had known you_, he thinks, regretfully. _I wish_ -

There is no more time for regrets. Dimly, he realizes that someone is calling to him. Has that voice always been there? No matter. That he can hear it now is enough.

"You _idiot_! You're so - you didn't have to -"

_I did_, says Doumeki faintly, although he doesn't quite know what it is he ought not to have done. The voice is distorted, as though someone is calling to him from underwater, and it's getting harder to focus, with everything slowly, but surely, slipping away.

"- for someone like _me_ -"

He catches a glimpse of that face, for the first time in all these years, and is surprised - it is impossibly young, a boy of no more than sixteen, a boy he has never met. And yet he's filled with a powerful longing like nothing he's ever known, nothing like the lukewarm feelings that kept Kunogi near his side until she passed. The boy is crying - crying for Doumeki, whose time is almost up. He thinks, _at last_. He thinks, _don't cry for me_. He thinks, _so it was you all along_.

Then their hands meet, and his is not the wrinkled hand of an old man but young, and strong - like it was when he was still a boy, and spent an hour before dawn every morning searching for someone, just outside the temple gates, where they would walk to school -

"I've found you," he says, softly, and smiles, as darkness overtakes him.

**fin.**


End file.
